review “Black Joy/White Fragility”

“Centering communication and/as performance of a community-organized system of accountability, these loose parameters and foregrounding of care labor expanded the edges of what constituted ‘the performance’ and redefined where the critical pedagogical exchanges were taking place. If Black Joy/White Fragility was a spatial-political proposition conceived for—though not delimited to—Kunstinstituut Melly, it was one meant to be considered by Smith and the community of performers together. Reciprocally, visitors were asked to practice respect. With a strict no-photography rule in place, Smith rejected the impulse to capture the experience. Come, witness, tune oneself to the resonances, and learn.”

In her review of artist Joy Mariama Smith’s installation Black Joy/White Fragility⁠⁠(opens in a new tab)⁠ at Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam, Hoetger reflects on the ways in which the artist’s durational performance worked across sound, movement and design. Through what Mariama Smith described as acts of “trying to heal, trying to vibrate the building,” Hoetger proposes, the project is an experiment in the assembly of non-rigid collectivities, which operate at the (blurry) edges of legibility and illegibility, transparency and opacity, visibility and invisibility, inside and outside.